Dr Christina Higgins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she teaches courses in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and intercultural communication. Her recent research has focused on communication in NGO-sponsored HIV/AIDS prevention and awareness education in Tanzania, where she has investigated the discursive construction of local and global worldviews. In her book, English as a local language: Post-colonial identities and multilingual practices (Multilingual Matters), she has also explored the role of language and popular culture in HIV/AIDS awareness efforts in hip hop lyrics and in public health advertisements. Her website can be found at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~cmhiggin.

Christina Higgins is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Second Language Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, Honolulu, USA. Her main areas of interest are the sociopolitics of English as a global language and the sociolinguistics of multilingual societies. She has focused her research in Kenya and Tanzania, where she has investigated how multilingual individuals use English alongside their other languages to produce local and global identifications across domains such as workplace conversation, advertising, popular culture, and HIV/AIDS education.

The author clearly has an extensive knowledge of multilingual practices around the world. Her very detailed information about the sociolinguistics of mixed languages in Tanzania and Kenya is particularly impressive.

Professor Tope Omoniyi, Roehampton University, UK:

Hitherto, this field of scholarship has been dominated by the research of English as an ‘international language’ or ‘global language’ or ‘world language’. But in this book, Christina Higgins jettisons that norm and brings a daring yet refreshing new voice to the debate by focusing on the appropriation of English as a local language and mapping the politics of its co-existence with indigenous languages in Kenya and Tanzania. She has developed a framework that places multilingual practices at the theoretical centre while responding brilliantly to the growing relevance of social theory in sociolinguistics.